Opening in March 2026 at The Lost Estate home in West London, Black cat! is the latest creation from The Lost Estate, the company behind it The big Christmas party and 58th Street; acclaimed for transforming live performances into fully realized worlds.
Here, the audience will be transported to the bohemian Montmartre of the 1890s, inside the legendary The black cat – the original Parisian cabaret club that launched a cultural revolution and gave birth to the modern nightlife we still hunt today.
It begins, as all good nights in Paris do, with a secret door.
Walk through it and find yourself in the heart of Montmartre in 1896 – a world of smoke, song and riot. The clinking of glasses, the smell of absinthe, the pulse of the music rising through the night.
Welcome to Black cat!where The Lost Estate invites audiences to travel back to the birthplace of cabaret for an evening of art, absinthe and anarchy.
At the center of the story is Rodolphe Salis – the real owner of Le Chat Noir and the architect behind its most infamous cabarets – as he prepares his latest and most ambitious creation: a feverish celebration of love and madness. Played by the “Dandy King of Cabaret”, Joe Morrose, Salis is a man on fire with ideas, a career between anarchy and art, chasing one last moment of transcendence before the curtain falls.
Tonight he has called upon the greatest performers of his age – magician Buatier De Kolta (performed by acclaimed magician Neil Kelso), dancer Cléo de Mérode, mime Paul LeGrand (performed by virtuoso Pi the Mime), and chanteuse Yvette Guilbert – to create a finale, an evening of French art, madness and loving revues. Together they conjure up a variety show of ruthless brilliance, accompanied by the club’s master band, Les Enfants Vagabondes.
A wild troupe of bohemian musicians, led by the young Erik Satie, take their place at the heart of Chat Noir!. One of the most eccentric and influential figures of the Parisian avant-garde, the audience joins Satie at the height of his career as the true resident pianist of the original Le Chat Noir – a composer whose music would go on to define a generation of French modernism. The ensemble, known as Les Enfants Vagabondes, performs new arrangements of French Late Romantic masterpieces by The Lost Estate’s composer, Steffan Rees. Their ragtag quintet – piano, violin, cello, accordion and percussion – recreates Debussy’s MoonlightBizet’s CarmenBerlioz’s Fantastic symphony and Saint-Saëns Dance of the Macabre for a night that blurs the line between elegance and delirium.
As the evening unfolds, their performances flow from stage to floor, musicians roaming between tables while a mesmerizing sequence of shadow puppets transform light and smoke into living art. It is a world where sound, movement and illusion intertwine, and where cabaret first sparked a global phenomenon.
As night falls, guests slip into a world of after-dark fun. Inside, they become part of history as they join the writers, illustrators, poets and musicians who made Montmartre hum – the artists, revolutionaries and mad romantics who lived the night and dined between poems, paintings and half-finished manifestos. The experience evokes the secret dinners of Paris’ wayward aristocrats, where indulgence is an art form and pleasure a quiet rebellion.
The guests eat as they did – not with aristocratic formality but with appetite and abandon. The tables are loaded with the classic haute cuisine dishes that gave birth to modern gastronomy: Coq au Vin, Creme Bruleechampagne, absinthe, Parisian cocktails and an extensive old fashioned wine list. The Lost Estate Executive Chef Ashley Clarke and Head of Beverages Ilya Demenkov have created a feast of butter, brilliance and bohemia, served under flickering lamplight.
This is a journey through time with velvet and smoke – a living, breathing story where music, theatre, design and hospitality become a single work of art. This extraordinary immersive world is created by The Lost Estate’s design director Thomas Kirk Shannon, lighting designer Mike Gunning (Alice’s Adventures Underground, Drowned Man, Grace Jones) and couture by Susan Kulkarni (Secret Cinema, Come Alive!). The Lost Estate is fast becoming a leader in immersive live art experiences, crafting worlds that blur the lines between stage and reality, offering Londoners something rare: a night that feels like it could change history – a night out, a century in the making.
The world of Black cat! is designed to give up. Dressed in vintage Parisian style – silks, velvets, waistcoats and smoky eyes – guests cross a threshold where phones are banned and time loses its grip. Somewhere between dinner and dream, the city outside disappears and the cabaret begins.
Speaking about the experience, William Kunhardt, co-founder of The Lost Estate, said: “Every experience at The Lost Estate begins the same way – an obsession with a moment in time when art, hospitality and visionary people collided to create a turning point in culture.
“Black cat! is the expression of our latest obsession: the bohemian subculture of 1890s Paris, the dawn of French Haute Cuisine, and in the middle of it all impresario Rodolphe Salis with his masterpiece, Le Chat Noir. It was the world’s first cabaret – a nightclub where great French artists gathered to share and experiment, where every layer of Parisian society came to be entertained, provoked and liberated. Food, drink and artistic freedom became one. A movement was born that would change global culture forever. What a moment to bring back to life – to give people the chance to travel back in time and step into this extraordinary nocturnal world, fully enjoy and live out one of the most explosive, daring and hedonistic moments in European cultural history.”
Black cat! opens in West Kensington, London on 24 March 2026. Tickets available here.
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